Continental · 1906–1975
Hannah Arendt
German-Jewish political theorist who fled Nazism for America
Arendt analysed totalitarianism as a new form of rule built on terror and ideology, coined the phrase “the banality of evil”, and defended political action among equals as the heart of human freedom.
Life and thought
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) grew up in a secular Jewish family in Königsberg and studied with Heidegger, Husserl and Karl Jaspers, who supervised her doctorate on Augustine. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, she fled to Paris, was interned in France in 1940 and escaped to New York in 1941. Stateless for years, she became a US citizen in 1951, the year The Origins of Totalitarianism made her name, and later taught at Chicago and the New School.
Arendt argued that Nazism and Stalinism were not old tyrannies in new dress but a new form of rule that used ideology and terror to make human beings superfluous. In The Human Condition she distinguished labour (keeping alive), work (making lasting things) and action (speaking and acting together in public), and held that modern society had pushed action aside. Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she described the “banality of evil”: great crimes committed by a thoughtless functionary rather than a demon, a phrase that provoked fierce controversy.